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Contents

This page is devoted to physical
implementations of the Block I and Block II AGCs, and their peripherals
such as DSKYs. In other words, to physical devices that you could
build and keep in your living room to impress friends and
neighbors. Be the first on your block to have one!

John Pultorak's Block I
AGC Project

The Pultorak PDFs

John Pultorak
has
constructed a physical (not virtual), working model
of a Block I AGC out of 74LS-series low-power Schottky TTL
devices. The model works, and runs software which John has
adapted from Colossus 249 software. John's unit even has the same
general appearance as the original Block I AGC prototype! Of
course, Colossus 249 software is targeted for the Block II AGC rather
than the Block I AGC, but
then nobody seems to presently know the whereabouts of any Block I AGC
software source code. (If you do know where any Block I code is,
let us know!)

No manned mission ever flew with a Block I AGC. It was originally
intended that Apollo 1 and Apollo 2 would be Block I missions; but I'm
sure you know what happened to Apollo 1, and Apollo 2 never took place.

John has thoughtfully provided us with his schematic diagrams, with
adapted Block II software, and with his
cross-assembler. You can read all about it—or as you'll see
below, mostly about it—at
the various mirror websites hosting John's docs:

At the present time (12/26/04), what you'll find on these websites is a
series of PDF files documenting John's project. I'll refer to
these as the Pultorak
PDFs.

How is this Related to Virtual AGC?

It's not. John's project is not an offshoot of the Virtual AGC
project, or vice-versa, and neither project uses materials created by
the other. But John's project is at an end, and he doesn't want
the hassle of maintaining a web presence for it, whereas Virtual AGC
is an ongoing project. Nor does John maintain any of the websites
mentioned above. So as a courtesy, the Virtual AGC website is
going to host
supplemental materials for the Pultorak project that haven't yet worked
their way into the other websites mentioned above.

AGC Source Code

AGC source code (flight software adapted for Block I and for John's
cross-assembler, test & checkout software, and so forth) is
provided in the Pultorak PDFs. But the PDFs often provide
assembly listings—i.e., reports generated by the assembler—rather
than pure source code. An assembly listing isn't a legal
assembly-language source-code file, so you can't conveniently change
and reassemble it. You can get a zipfile
containing the source code and some supplemental files (such as hex
files) by clicking
here (1 MB).

Unfortunately, the format accepted by John's cross-assembler isn't
compatible with yaYUL (or
vice-versa), so these source files cannot be assembled by yaYUL. They must be assembled
using John's cross-assembler.

Assembler and Simulator Source Code

The C++ source code for John's PC-based cross-assembler and simulator
do appear in the Pultorak PDFs, but rather than cutting-and-pasting you
may find it more convenient to download a zipfile by clicking here
(3.7 MB).

Circuit Design

The Pultorak PDFs do provide schematic diagrams, but some readers have
commented that it is difficult to make out some of the details in
them.
You can download a zipfile containing the complete CAD files for the
design by clicking
here (1.7 MB). The CAD files are in Circuitmaker format
(*.ckt), but even if you don't have a copy of Circuitmaker, the zipfile
may be worth downloading because it also contains:

WMF (Windows Metafile) versions of the schematics that are more
legible than those in the Pultorak PDFs; and

An Excel spreadsheet with a partlist for the design.

At the time John created these materials and first sent them to me, Circuitmaker was available
commercially, and if you couldn't affort the full version of the
program you could either have downloaded the free but limited "student"
version of the software, or else you could download a full but
time-limited demo version of the program. Since that time,
however, the company which was selling Circuitmaker
has apparently been acquired by Altium, and the Circuitmaker program has been discontinued.
According to Altium's
website, the substantially more expensive Altium Designer product is supposed
to be able to import existing Circuitmaker
schematics. I have no idea whether this is true or not, though my
past experiences in such situations leads me to be suspicious about
it. If anybody else has tried it (and cares to convert John's
schematics for me), please let me know.

In order to run Circuitmaker,
you have to use Options/LibraryLocation
(full or demo version) or File/Preferences/DirectoriesAndFiles (student
version) on the menu to set the location of the "user library"
(USER.LIB) that
comes in our zipfile.
(After doing so, you will probably also have to exit from Circuitmaker
and then re-run it, because Circuitmaker
will already have loaded the
default USER.LIB into its internal cache, and it won't reload it until
being restarted.) Otherwise, when you load the schematics
they will have wires but no electrical components on them.
Incidentally, although
Circuitmaker2000 is a Windows
program, both the student and demo
versions run just fine under Linux
with CrossOver Office.
They may run fine too under normal Wine,
but I haven't tried it.

One thing you will likely want to do with Circuitmaker is to create a
netlist. Neither the student nor demo versions of Circuitmaker
seem to want to admit the notion that a single IC can contain multiple
gates, and will therefore likely display an error prompt asking if you
want to "correct" this condition. If you say "yes", Circuitmaker
will arbitrarily relabel the components within the schematic, so that
only one gate appears in each package. My advice would be to say
"no" (not to correct), as the only negative side-effect of doing so
appears to be that the netlist file will have duplicate entries for the
packages with multiple gates, but the wire-list will be correct.

Dimitris
Vitoris's Block I and Block II AGC Project

The project of Dimitris ("Jim") Vitoris takes over where John
Pultorak's project stops. The project is still in its very first
stages, so please don't take any statements made here as
commitments! But the basic idea of the project is to be able to
create a physical implementation of a Block II AGC and DSKY, which
(unlike John Pultorak's Block I AGC above) can be constructed by
hobbyists, without requiring the immense skill needed to construct a
Pultorak AGC.

Here is a very uncertain
roadmap of the project. It may be that all of these phases will
be completed, or it may be that the project will stop where it is
now. Or perhaps some phases might be skipped. There is no
timetable. But however it goes, thanks Dimitris!

Project Phase

Description

Status

A0

Conversion of John Pultorak's
Block I AGC design (schematics only!) to Eagle CAD, with corrections and
small improvements.

Ready now!

A1

A clean restructuring of the
Block I design -- for example, with AGC, DSKY, and monitoring busses
separated into independent assemblies rather than being a part of one
large assembly.

Further, final size reduction of
the Block II design, with added Virtual AGC compatibility. (This
would mean, for example, that one of Dimitris's physical DSKY could be
used with a PC running Virtual AGC.)

The download is a zipfile containing the complete set of
materials that have been created by Dimitris so far.

Dimitris uses Eagle CAD for
this project (www.cadsoft.de).
Eagle is a cross-platform
program that is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. While
Eagle is a proprietary program
that costs money to purchase, there is a free version that can be used
with small designs. I have verified that the free version does
allow viewing of the phase A0 schematics on Linux.

Once phase B0 and beyond are reached, it would be valuable to have
mechanical design and drawings of things such as DSKYs, enclosures,
front panels, and so forth, so that complete physical units can be
constructed. Any mechanical engineers who are interested should
contact me at the email address at the bottom of this page.
Mechanical design of a Block II DSKY in particular would be useful,
regardless of the how far Dimitris cares to advance his project.

Dimitris has also sent some photos of the physical device he is
constructing:

The physical faceplate, work in
progress!

Cleaned-up stylized drawing
from which measurements can
be taken. A CorelDraw file
is also
available.

Dimitris mentions that his best estimate of the faceplate dimensions is
18.9 cm (7.44 in.) wide and 21.8 cm. (8.58 in.) high, and points out
that additional dimensions can be extract from the right-hand drawing
above.

Philip Schmidt's Block I
AGC Project

Philip Schmidt has also been kind enough to let us know about his Block I physical
implementation. You can see his write-up of what he's been doing
at his own
web-page. Phil tells me that he will eventually provide all
of the CAD files for his design (in Altium
Designer format), but for
right now it's all PDFs while it's a work in progress.

Who's Building Them? (Alessandro
Cinquemani)

Of course, the great thing about these projects is that you can start
from them and build your own AGC or DSKY. If you have done so,
feel free to send me some photos and/or descriptions of what you've
built. Where is Heathkit
when you need it?

Alessandro Cinquemani of Aviano, Italy, has sent in the very
nifty photo (click to enlarge) seen below.

As I understand it, here we're seeing the DSKY and CTL modules, which
Alessandro built by following through on John Pultorak's
documentation. Alessandro is still working on the MEM and PROC
modules, but when the AGC is fully operational is
considering making actual circuit boards. Great job,
Alessandro!

Update: Recently,
Alessandro has sent us a whole gallery of photo updates, reluctantly
down-sampled by me to save some space. He tells us (2009-06-17)
that he thinks he may be able to finish it up in 3-4 months.
Click'n'enjoy:

Other?

My personal bias is that I'd prefer it if these materials were
available for use with a free and open-source CAD system rather than
proprietary systems such as Circuitmaker
and Eagle. The
subsequent discontinuation of the Circuitmaker
program (mentioned above) puts the problem in stark relief: John
Pultorak spent a lot of time creating these materials, and yet within
just a few years nobody will be able even to open the CAD files he
created. This website deals with things that happened (as of this
writing) 40 years ago, and I'd like the information presented
here to still be useful 40 years from now ... or 400. But the CAD
files have proven to have a shelf-life of less than 5!

Such absurd situations should come as no surprise to anybody with
substantial experience in using electrical CAD systems. Speaking
from experience, every
proprietary electrical CAD program is eventually discontinued either by
virtue of acquisition of the manufacturer or else a strategic decision
by the manufacturer, and the schematic format is then orphaned, usually
even without any documentation. Yet I've never encountered an
electrical designer who had noticed this fact or believed it was a
problem; instead, CAD software is invariably chosen on the basis of
whatever features are most convenient to the designer at that moment in
time. Indeed, I've made such selections myself, based on
whatever software has the fastest or best autorouter. But the
autorouter relates only to PCB layout, and has essentially no relation
to schematic capture, which could be done by a separate program from
the PCB layout program entirely. Schematic capture and PCB layout are
interrelated only by exchange of netlists and back-annotation info, and
the notion that the two must be integrated into one program is a
fantasy promoted by CAD manufacturers and swallowed en masse by circuit
designers. I'd venture the advice that if you're going to use a
proprietary CAD program, it's best to use one that supports the Orcad file format, and to archive
your work in that format, since it's the closest thing to a de facto standard that exists at
the present time.

It would be
nice if an open-source CAD tools were used instead, so that the
schematics, PCB layouts, etc., would
be freely editable by everybody without purchasing a proprietary
tool. If
anybody wants to convert the CAD files into a more open format,
your help would be welcomed. I highly recommend that the target
schematic-capture format should be that of the free
open-source tool gEDA.
Of course, if you absolutely insisted, we'd be happy to have Orcad, or any other format as
well! I've so far not found an
automated
tool to perform the conversion of Circuitmaker
or Eagle to any other
format. (If you wanted
to write a program that converted Circuitmaker
or Eagle files to gEDA or
some other format, I'm sure that would be even more valuable than the
conversion itself.)